To meet the Internet bandwidth demands of member institutions, KENET expanded the last mile infrastructure, national backbone network, and international circuits. The following is a summary of the expansion:

• Twenty-eight (28) new last mile connections were added using leased lines or Wi-Fi radio. This added 290 Mb/s of subscription capacity. The total number of campuses connected increased from 198 to 227. In addition, about 12 satellite campuses were closed.
• KENET developed 20 last mile fiber links to 20 campuses at a cost $559,625. These links not only increased the capacity, but also reduced the cost of leased lines. They include last mile fiber to Taita Taveta University, Broglio Space Station, SEKU and University of Kabianga, among others.
• The backbone links from Nakuru, Nyeri and Meru were upgraded from 1 Gb/s to 10 Gb/s to ensure low congestion and accommodate the increasing subscriptions of member institutions.
• KENET added 2 Gb/s of international capacity and activated local peering of international circuits. The total international circuits capacity is 6,350 Mb/s and the total international capacity is now 17,350 Mb/s (10 Gb/s to Mombasa, 1 Gb/s LTK peering + international capacity)

KENET also changed the leased line capacity from 31,200 Mb/s to 30,858 Mb/s and the negotiated reduction in leased line unit prices with Liquid Telecom and Safaricom.

The effect of the new leased line prices and network expansion translates to a reduction in cost of operating KENET shall be passed on in 2018 from weighted unit cost of $60 in July 2017 to $40 in January 2018. KENET will be distributing 20,000 Mb/s in January 2018 compared to 11,000 Mb/s in January 2017 a growth of about 82%.

Figure 1 shows the KENET network coverage and connections to the global research and education network.

Figure 1: KENET network connectivity map

Data Center Infrastructure expansion

KENET is currently setting up a new data centre in Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA) at a cost of US $200,000 to be used by KENET members for hosting their services or disaster recovery sites. This will be the third fully-fledged KENET owned data centre facility. KENET has existing data centers at the University of Nairobi (UoN) and at United States International University (USIU) that were set up in 2011. This expansion increases the data center space available to KENET members by 22%. It shall be used to scale up the cloud and shared services offered to member institutions. The need for multiple data centres allows Universities located along Thika Road to have the option to collocate their Disaster Recover (DR) data in CUEA while the ones on Langata area can collocate at USIU or UoN. Additionally, KENET has increased the storage capacity available for member institutions by 43% at a cost US $80,000 in anticipation of increased subscription for storage backup services of critical data and improvement of their information assurance.
 
Fiber Network Connectivity Expansion
As part of the global research and education networks, KENET interconnects with other research networks via the Regional Research and Education Network (RREN) for Eastern and Southern Africa called Ubuntunet. This allows for the exchange of traffic and collaboration between Kenyan institutions and other research and education institutions using a dedicated global network that is independent of the commercial Internet. This has the advantage of direct connectivity between researchers in Kenya and those in Uganda, Zambia, South Africa, Europe or the USA.